I once heard a historian suggest that every Member of Congress should carry a digital recorder in their pocket, have it always turned on, and make a copy each night, to be released some years in the future, as a record of what they really did. This suggestion, while unlikely to be heeded, shows how much technology has changed what it means to be public, and what it means to be exposed, or even to be documented.
My high school English teacher used to bemoan the decline of the handwritten word, suggesting that notes that become artifacts have a certain permanence lacking in email. While I agree that handwriting contains a very personal element, and a more intimate presence, digital records are changing what we even think about as our history of ourselves. Jorge Luis Borges, as quoted in the April 2008 Harper’s:
For me death is hope, the irrational certitude of being abolished, erased, and forgotten. When I’m sad, I think, What does it matter what happens to a twentieth-century South American writer? What do I have to do with all of this? You think it matters what happens to me now, if tomorrow I will have disappeared? I hope to be totally forgotten. I believe this is death.
Borges, purveyor of twisted metaphysical fiction, also appears in the research of Jonah Bossewitch, (slideshow, paper) who writes about personal information and authority in a digital age: “Unforgettable, in Every Way“.
From the surveillance gargoyles in Neil Stephensen’s Snow Crash, to Jeremy Bentham’s prison panopticon, from social networking to youtube and America’ Funniest Videos and Cops, from user-generated content to information reported by authorities, information access changes the way we witness ourselves.
On witness, here’s Rives on truth and learning, or what he calls a mockingbird in a mason jar:
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